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1/3
Every television on Earth was tuned to same channel.
The Internet groaned under the weight of the endlessly swapped video streams, the excited and sometimes vicious commentary, the shared experience of teleparties and the insatiable thirst of the commercial concerns to capitalize on the event with sales and contests, puzzles and games, spam and swindles. Each network had tailored its own theme music and inspiring graphics; each government agency stood on alert with a stack of speeches pre-written to cover any contingency.
Words painted in laser light were spread over the face of the Moon itself, proudly glowing letters dozens of kilometers wide: Pepsi Presents - Planetfall Mars.
Sixty million kilometers away the object of the world's scrutiny plummeted through an airless void, its flotsam-pitted nose pointed into the swelling maw of the red planet. The burnished globe cast bloody highlights on the ship's proud white hull, pristine save for streaks of grime painted backward from the odd seam, and the radial halos of advertisements clustered around the exterior cameras.
She was called Pinnacle, and her name was underlined by the flags of several of Earth's wealthiest nations.
The ship was a modified Orion with an extended service module to accommodate the descent-ascent vehicle. Twin solar panels extended from port and starboard, like moth wings. They had Pepsi logos on them. By way of further decoration one of the thruster housings had been signed by a thousand children dying of cancer. The thrusters within were now dark. Pinnacle was coasting. She was engaged in a long, slow fall.
Mars waited; Mars pulled.
In her wake Pinnacle left a sparse trail of debris, like discarded plastic food containers, compressed cubes of the unreclaimable faecal detritus, and the shrouded corpse of Mission Specialist Lillian Cheswick. Cheswick had taken her own life for reasons NASA's top psychologists were still struggling to understand, her frozen body destined to spin in space for centuries, an infinitesimal dollop of jetsam too small for even the keenest telescopes to see.
Whenever the interior cameras were live the crew wore black armbands, and assumed solemn expressions.
"Naturally, Lillian's passing is still heavy on our minds," Mission Commander Major Keith Nelly told CNN, "but every man and woman on this crew stands on a lifetime of duty, and I know every one of them is one hundred and ten percent focussed on the mission at hand." After a brief pause he added, "And there's nothing as refreshing as an ice cold can of Pepsi when there's important work, like this, to be done."
The interview concluded, and the red light over the dark camera lens faded. Major Nelly sighed and ran a wide hand through his golden locks. His wandering gaze unintentionally caught the eye of Captain Grimaux floating upsidown beside him. She cocked her head at him. "Subtle," she said, her dark hair fanning around her in a micro-gravity swirl.
"If it weren't for the sponsors," Nelly reminded her, "there'd be nobody on this old trip but robot fellers, and we'd all be sitting at home watching it happen on the TV."
"Spare me the folksy twang, Keith. Nobody's listening but us."
"I'm not even listening now," claimed Captain Lawrence Abrams, MD, as he drifted by with a smirk.
Nelly glowered at him. "We've all got to do our part, folks. Let's pull together as a team. I know what happened to Lillian is a cloud over us, but we've all got to work through it and put on a good face. The world is watching."
Abrams pursed his lips as he kicked off from the helm console, his arms working in a lazy front crawl. "Actually, Major, I think the world is watching a commercial."
Major Keith Nelly had turned to examining the pores on his nose critically with a palm-sized mirror. He was painfully aware that his image was being projected fifty feet high in stadiums around the world, and though he had not heretofore considered himself a vain man over the past months he found himself increasingly obsessed with his physical presentation. His nerves buzzed with the knowledge that in a matter of hours he would become the most famous person alive.
"You look fabulous," Abrams assured him, ricocheting gracefully off the bulkhead over the mission commander's head and sailing slowly back towards Grimaux like a human ping-pong ball.
Nelly flicked his eyes over to Abrams in the mirror. "You sound sarcastic."
"I'm never sarcastic."
"You're making fun of me," insisted Nelly petulantly.
"I'm not, I'm not," claimed Abrams. "If I were a teenage girl I'd have pictures of you tacked up over my bed so you could infect my dreams."
"Everyone is always making fun of me these days."
Grimaux raised one sharply arched brow. "Now why would we do that, Keith?"
"I don't know," mumbled Nelly, teasing out his sideburns with a practiced pinch of his manicured nails. "Maybe you're jealous."
"Of what?" asked Abrams, pushing off Grimaux's console and drifting back toward Nelly.
"You're being purposefully dense, Doc," grumbled Nelly. "You know exactly what's going to happen when I step out onto the surface: I'm going to be bigger than Neil Armstrong -- hell, I'll be bigger than Suri Cruise. It's going out hyper-definition three-sixty: top-notch historic TV. They'll be playing the clip for centuries."
Abrams considered this as he floated, his expression philosophical. "A man lands on Mars, sure, they put it on television," he said. "But when the first Jew lands on Mars -- that gets written down."
"Are you trying to be funny?"
"I'm completely serious."
Nelly sniffed. "Since when is print bigger than TV?"
Abrams spread his arms in a hapless shrug, but said nothing.
Back in the habitation module Lieutenant Franklin Fisher and Commander Balour Anoush were playing checkers on a magnetic board velcroed to the side of Fisher's wardrobe. "I hate checkers," said Fisher bitterly, winning the game. He was lanky for a Air Force man, tall and slender and delicate with sharp cheekbones and white-blonde hair. As a computer scientist he was ostensibly responsible for maintaining Pinnacle's AI systems, but since the AI systems hadn't yet fumbled he spent most of the last months learning to despise leisure games of all varieties, with a special, vicious contempt reserved for checkers.
"Let's play again," he said. Anoush nodded, already resetting the board.
Balour Anoush was an excellent scientist, but stood accused of being beautiful instead. She lived in a perpetual game of cat and mouse with the shipboard cameras, striving to stay one step ahead of anywhere live. She was a doll to them. She hated being on television. She hated to be stared at. She hated the sick adoration. She hated, she hated, she hated.
"I hate you, Frank," she said.
"That's cool," said Fisher. "Your go."
"I'm serious this time."
Fisher frowned. "Mumble," he warned quietly. "Do you want an extra psych interview? The micro's listening." He smiled grimly and gestured at the board. "Hate the game. That's normal and healthy."
"I do hate the game," she admitted, head sagging.
"Buck up. We're almost there. You'll be busy. It'll be different."
"Indeed," agreed Anoush, making her move. The pieces clicked. "I'll be the subject of an entirely new round of humiliations as humanity's celebrity astro-whore."
Fisher couldn't argue with that. His own trials of publicity lay ahead. Fisher had accepted an exceedingly generous stipend from a coalition of activist groups to announce himself upon entering orbit as the first extra-terrestrial homosexual. Frank Fisher, however, was not gay. As the day of arrival grew nearer he was coming to see his greed in accepting the offer as increasingly regrettable. He wondered how he would explain his public outing to his mother. "Granted," he agreed with a nod. "But you'll finally get to build your little fort."
"Habitat," Anoush corrected him. "Don't call it a fort. It's undignified."
"Now there's just the kind of down home team spirit we all like, folks."
"Don't imitate Keith," said Anoush, looking over her shoulder nervously. "He'll hear you."
"Hey," said Fisher, "watch out: that camera's going live..."
He looked around. Balour Anoush had already escaped, a stray pen tumbling lazily in her wake. The red light over the lens stopped flashing and lit steady. Fisher grinned idiotically, and then folded away the checkers set inside his wardrobe drawer. "Hi folks, I'm just here...in the hab," he concluded lamely. His eyes flicked over the cue panel. "Brought to you in part by Toyota."
Every camera throughout and upon the ship was going live, the red lights above their lenses winking in warning. Pinnacle was entering high Mars orbit, and the crew were expected to look busy while she did so. It was a World Broadcast Event, one in a series of such noted in the mission calendar -- the last flagged as "minor" before the colossal hooplah of the planetfall itself.
In the command module Major Keith Nelly was peering through the forward viewports, squinting meaningfully at the mottled globe's rusty, sunlit face. Yolande Grimaux was strapped into the helm console, her fingers tapping on the glass instrument panels arrayed around her. Lawrence Abrams floated across the room, panning his head from side to side as if in search of something. He toggled the test circuit on the emergency cabin lighting. "Check," he said. "Check, check."
"Next burn in T-minus fifteen seconds," called Grimaux importantly. "Mark."
"Secure all hands," contributed the mission commander as he watched everyone worm into their harnesses. Several of the camera apertures buzzed in concert as they zoomed in on Balour Anoush. She looked at her feet.
There was a vague rumble. The crew felt a brief tug of inertia.
After a moment Major Nelly began to nod somberly. "Amazing," he whispered. "If only you could see what I'm seeing here today," he narrated as a camera pod moving past the cockpit temporarily obscured his view of the planet. "People of Earth -- we have successfully inserted at Mars. I repeat: insertion successful."
As rehearsed the crew applauded themselves and then clapped one another on the shoulder as they twisted in their harnesses to shake hands. Fisher hooted like an ape, and Grimaux squinched up her eyes and made herself cry.
"So..." said Abrams. "Are we there yet?"
Everyone roared with laughter. The cue panels signalled a commercial interval, and one by one the red lights over the lenses went dark. The laughter petered out abruptly. "This is so embarrassing," muttered Grimaux. "I'm not an astronaut, I'm a muppet."
Fisher unharnessed himself with a grunt. "Come on," he said, kicking off to the flight engineering console. "Let's try to get some real work done before we go live again."
There were nods of agreement. Despite the ridiculous trials of televised life, they were each of them consummate professionals: intelligent, dedicated, skilled and serious. Grimaux and Fisher cooperated to cover the late Lillian Cheswick's navigational and attitudinal checks while Abrams and Anoush ran down the status lights on Pinnacle's internal condition: temperature, atmospheric pressure, fuel consumption, radiation. "After all these months, you're the only one who doesn't look down my shirt while I work," Anoush murmured to Abrams. "I'd like to thank you for that."
"Forget about it," replied Abrams, eyes on the controls. "If I ogle Muslim breasts my Israeli passport spontaneously bursts into flame. It's a new security feature."
Anoush smiled despite herself. "What does that prevent?"
"Like all security features," grunted Abrams as he cross-checked his status board against a clipboard, "it prevents happiness and, as a side effect, the occasional rare horror."
"Horrors arising from breasts?"
"Oh yes," said Abrams seriously, turning to look into her gold-flecked brown eyes. "Mark my words: without breasts the world would know only peace."
"You're a misogynist?"
Abrams shrugged again, then looked down at her bosom with theatric emphasis. "I prefer to think of myself a warhawk, actually."
Grimaux and Fisher were also chatting. Fisher wanted tips on how to appear convincingly gay, and Grimaux wanted him to shut up. "We recorded some vibration in the starboard isochoric manifold," she said, tapping at the display with a mechanical pencil. "Does it show up in your tables?"
"How flamboyant is too flamboyant? I don't want to simper."
Grimaux rolled her eyes. "Keep your mind on the manifold, Frank."
"Why aren't you making some kind of announcement, too?"
"Because I have dignity," she snapped. "I need you to confirm this perturbance for me. Frank?"
"But why didn't they approach you?"
"Who says they didn't?"
"You said no?"
"I said my sexual orientation has absolutely nothing to do with my job."
Fisher whistled. "You're a better man than me, Yolande."
"I know."
And the world held its collective breath nine hours later as Major Nelly, Captain Abrams and Commander Anoush wormed their way through the narrow tunnel that connected Pinnacle's interior space to the mouth of the Midas descent-ascent vehicle. Under the watchful eyes of a sextet of cabin cameras they nestled themselves into their seats and crossed the harnesses over their bodies. The scene inside the lander was quiet and businesslike, but they knew it was being projected back on Earth accompanied by a rousing original score by one of Hollywood's finest composers -- strings, brass, kettle drums, choir.
"Houston, we are secured aboard the DAV," reported Major Nelly.
"Initiating pre-flight check," said Anoush.
"Check, check, check," said Abrams, flipping switches.
Fisher's voice crackled over the speakers. "Your Micro-Googol is compiled and active, all modules verified and all satellite dependencies linked. I have a green board, Major."
"Status nominal," contributed the Micro-Googol cheerfully.
Grimaux's voice came in next. "Drop window opportunity alpha in T-minus seven minutes, thirty seconds...mark."
Everyone did their best to refrain from wincing or giggling while Fisher made his extra-terrestrial homosexual proclamation, his voice quavering. After that a recording of school children chorusing their multilingual felicitations was played, followed by a brief message from the President of the United States. "All our hopes and dreams ride with you," she said. "And our most heartfelt prayers."
"Thank you, Mrs. President," replied Major Nelly solemnly. "God bless America."
The aft section of the service module spread like flower petals, hinges humming while a diffuse bloom of ice crystals coasted carelessly away. The lander's hull creaked as a blaze of unmitigated sunlight warmed it in the space of a few seconds. The thrusters began to vibrate, the formation beacons to blink.
"Opportunity alpha in T-minus one minute," crackled Grimaux over the radio.
Helmets were sealed, the air gauges tapped. The three planetfellers steeled themselves, eyes roving the readouts. Anoush flexed her gloves against the handgrips, mouth tight and brow beetled in concentration. The cue panel over the main camera began to flash, and the mission commander read the words there with a hint of a sneer playing over his full, rosy lips. Abrams looked at him inquiringly -- it was rare to see Nelly baulk.
Major Nelly cleared his throat awkwardly. "Wouldn't tonight be a great night to license something the whole family can enjoy? Disney: family friendly feeds, forever."
"Nice read, Major," observed Abrams on the private circuit.
"Shut up, Lawrence."
A tone sounded. The mooring clamps released with a muffled bang. "Thirty seconds," signalled Grimaux. "Primaries are coming online, looking good."
The last half minute felt both long and short -- a gush of time expended in tedious slow-motion. Suddenly the view from the cabin windows changed. In one second they were expectantly staring up Pinnacle's densely packed rectum, and in the next second the mothership was dwindling to a bright point in the distance. A heartbeat later the lander shuddered as the thrusters ignited.
"You are free and clear to navigate," reported Grimaux from Pinnacle. "May the wind be at your backs, lady and gentlemen."
Nelly nodded in approval, toggling his mic to local only. "Do you think she rehearsed that line, or do you think it was ad lib?"
"Rehearsed," replied Anoush and Abrams in concert, as they had both been privy to endless weeks of Grimaux's practicing in the hab when she thought the others were asleep.
"It sounded very natural," admired Nelly.
"We're coming up to Manoeuvre One," warned Abrams, eyes glued to the instruments.
"Ten seconds," confirmed Anoush.
Manoeuvres One, Two, and Three went off without a hitch, and after just a few laps around the planet, Midas was aligned at the starting altitude for planetfall. Another three orbits were completed while Pinnacle and NASA confirmed every system, every setting, and every datum in the telemetry matrix. Updated satellite images were uploaded to Midas and, after a final weather check, they were given the green light to initiate descent.
Abrams got butterflies in his stomach. He belched.
Nelly looked over. "Doc?"
"Nominal here, Major."
The Micro-Googol worked through the pre-descent checklist. Nelly, Abrams and Anoush endeavoured to look busy, to appear as something more significant than ballast while the machine prepared to jeopardize their collective mortality. Standing on the surface or as a burning trail of ash through the sky, either way they would all be heroes within a quarter hour.
Midas plummeted. From silence a keening moan arose. The craft began to shake, atmosphere burning at its heel.
They were tossed roughly against their harnesses when the hypercone deployed with an explosive bang. Anoush cried out, then squeezed Abrams' forearm with her hand, causing an instant sensation across all media outlets.
"Steady, people!" bellowed Nelly into his helmet mic, startling everyone including himself.
The parachutes blasted free next, then cupped the sky with a harsh triple jerk. Through the viewports Nelly, Abrams and Anoush watched the space around the colourful chutes turn from bruised purple to bright salmon. A thin, wispy layer of blue-white cloud flashed past.
Nelly counted in the retrothrusters as the Micro-Googol announced their imminent firing. "Six, five -- ready up -- three, two, one..." He clenched his teeth as the ship shook violently, engines roaring. "Ignition!" Major Nelly added pointlessly, shouting into the microphone again.
"Oy!" cried Abrams.
They felt as if their organs were commingling unnaturally, pressed into a patty somewhere near their hollow-feeling bellies. Their tongues felt fat, their bums distant, their shoulders and eye-sockets as heavy as lead. And then, by gradual degrees, this discomfort came to be replaced by a sensation that turned out to be as wonderful as it was at first bewildering: the familiar lean of planetary gravity.
Midas bucked in a pocket of turbulence. The Micro-Googol beeped. The crew felt thumps and buzzing through their chairs as the landing legs unfolded and prepared to catch the world.
The view through the windows was lost in an ochre haze.
Like a punch in the chest, Midas landed. The craft sank low and recoiled, landing legs briefly leaving the surface again. It then bounced to a slow, grinding stop against the strut shocks. Abrams, who had not heretofore realized that he was holding his breath, resumed breathing. Stars winked in the corners of his vision.
Suddenly it was very quiet. The cabin swayed slightly as a whistling wind blew against it.
Nelly straightened in his seat, then turned to look directly at the main camera. "Yesterday," he pronounced carefully, his mouth dry, "was the last day when the word 'world' existed only in the singular. Today our horizons have doubled."
Abrams tapped him on the shoulder. "Your mic's still on local, Major."
"Damn," sighed Nelly. "I don't know if I can say it that smoothly again."
"Did you write that?" asked Abrams.
"Actually, no," admitted Nelly. "NASA had a team of PR guys do it up for me."
"It was very inspiring."
"Thanks, Doc."
Anoush frowned at the communications display. "It's all for nought anyway, Major. The video link is down."
"Video link interruption," supplied the Micro-Googol helpfully.
"Can we raise Houston?"
Anoush nodded. "Audio only. Looks like Frank's piggybacking a signal over the telemetry feed."
"Houston, we have a problem," called Nelly. "Some kind of failure in the broadcast pack. What do you read on your end? Over."
The silent seconds ticked by as Nelly's message was relayed at the speed of light back to Earth. Moments later: "Houston to DAV. We're working on it, Major. Standby. Over."
"The sponsors are going to have a fit," murmured Nelly with a sigh. "Is this Fisher's fault?"
"I don't think so," said Anoush, initiating a sweep of the laser radar. "This front moving over us seems to contain a fair amount of charged particulates -- ionized dust. It might be giving us interference."
"Somebody get out and jiggle the antenna," suggested Abrams.
Nelly narrowed his eyes. "That's not funny," he said. "No one goes out before I do, and I'm not jiggling anything until Houston gives me the green."
The cabin swayed in the wind again. The crew shifted in their seats. Abrams coughed, then glanced at the chronometer. He licked his lips and said, "I spy with my little eye..."
"Jesus, Abrams," growled Nelly. "Can it, will you?"
"...Something hazy and kind of orange."
Anoush tilted her helmet and looked up at the windows. "A dust storm on Mars?"
Abrams nodded. "You got me. So much for that game."
An hour passed, and then two. Fisher radioed in to walk Anoush through a reconfiguration of the broadcast pack. Abrams occupied himself by taking everyone's pulse and blood pressure. Nelly lay back in his seat, his lips twitching in quiet repetition of his professionally written planetfall phrase. From the looks of it he was experimenting with different spots of emphasis. "Our horizons..." he mouthed. "Our horizons..."
The buffeting winds began to dwindle and the sunlight streaming in through the windows became brighter and more sure. Between breezes a patch of clear, rosy sky could be seen.
Abrams carefully unharnessed himself. "What are you doing?" demanded Nelly, head snapping over to watch.
"I need to stretch. My legs are getting all verklempt."
Nelly frowned. Abrams ignored him. He stretched out his arms and then took hold of the handgrips over his head and hauled himself out of his seat with a sigh of satisfaction. His body felt heavy, even under the influence of Mars' feeble gravity, after so many long months cooped up aboard Pinnacle with only its cramped gymnastic rig to keep his muscles from turning to marmalade.
Abrams knocked his helmet against the top of the cabin as he strained to get his faceplate close enough to the window to see anything.
"Can you see anything?" asked Nelly anxiously.
"Well," Abrams observed blandly, "either we're on Mars or we've landed in a very expensive and convincing facsimile thereof. Nice dunes."
"Being here doesn't feel as special as I thought it would," remarked Anoush. "Can we take our helmets off yet?"
"Standby," said Nelly. He looked up at Abrams again. "Doc?"
Abrams shifted his feet as he twisted to look out the opposite window. His body tensed briefly, a flickering spasm Nelly watched flash from his shoulders to his pelvis. "What?" prompted Nelly. "You see something, Doc?"
"Um," said Abrams.
"Report!" barked Nelly.
Abrams looked down at him, his features oddly slack. "I'm not sure what to report here, Major. Can I see that lidar scan again, Balour?"
"What is it, man?" Nelly growled.
Abrams lowered himself back into his seat, reinserting his boots into the footwell gingerly. He blinked. "You know that old Stanley Kubrick movie, with the big black rectangles everywhere? They find one on the Moon, and another around Jupiter. What were they called? Monoliths. You know that movie with the monoliths?"
Nelly pursed his lips. "The one where the ship's computer goes crazy?"
"That's the one."
"What about it?"
Abrams took a deep breath, then swallowed loudly. "Well, there's one of them out there."
Nelly furrowed his brow. "One of what?"
Abrams' tone was disconnected, and strangely apologetic. "A monolith," he said quietly. "There's a monolith out there, Major."
2/3
There were technical difficulties. Billions stood by.
The televisions in the taverns were tuned to test patterns. Some desperate networks showed endless replays of archival footage from the Florida launch, with slow-motion sweeps of the crowded beaches cut in for good measure. Pundits argued, and experts mumbled blandly over animated diagrams of Pinnacle, Midas, and Mars.
"Okay, so I've been a NASA dancer for three years, and like I think it's totally scary not knowing what's going on down there in Mars. I mean, are they even okay and everything? Holy!"
There were interviews with the planetfall astronauts' families, challenging them to consider the spectrum of possible feelings they might experience were it the case that their loved ones had burned up on the way down or been dashed to pieces in a field of rusty boulders. There were interviews with the astronauts in orbit around the red planet, too, who smiled and nodded and tried to be as good natured as they could manage while they were questioned about their astrological signs, the new spring fashions, and the antics of celebrity miscreants.
"I really don't know what to say," said Grimaux.
"We're all hoping to have the communications problem licked as quick as can be," Fisher repeated for the hundredth time, hearing with horror how he had fallen against his will to aping Major Nelly's faux-folksy drawl.
"Why the hell am I doing that?" he demanded when the broadcast was over. He drifted across the habitation module and ran a bony hand through his fine hair, then cast Grimaux a forlorn look. "I'm cracking up, right?"
"You're doing it to feel straight," she replied wearily, pulling off her black armband.
"How do you reckon? Damn it -- I can't stop."
Grimaux balled up the armband and kicked it lazily through the companionway to the lab module. "You're unconsciously imitating the most masculine example in your environment. Think about it, Frank."
"Aren't you the most masculine example in my environment?"
"I guess you're just more naturally attracted to Keith."
"You're teasing me."
"It's so easy."
Fisher made a sour face. "God this is awful."
"Let's go see what Lillian's up to."
"That's not funny."
A hundred kilometers below Mission Commander Major Keith Nelly concluded his meditatively slow conference with the NASA brass and toggled his microphone from private to local. "Houston wants us to go out there," he pronounced gravely.
"Thank God," said Abrams. "I could use some fresh air."
Nelly ignored him. "Balour, get the packs ready. Doc, I want continuous monitoring on all of us. Got that? We've got no idea what this thing can do."
"In the movie all the monolith did was broadcast a powerful radio signal."
"This isn't the movies."
"True," agreed Abrams, elbowing Anoush conspiratorially. "The special effects are much better. I feel like I'm really on Mars."
"You are really on Mars," said Anoush with a bleak smile.
"That explains that."
The hatch cycled. A bath of diffuse carbon dioxide laced with brassy dust steamed into the cabin, and they each felt the temperature drop sharply. The heads-up display inside Abrams' helmet marked the changes in pressure and the ambient radiation outside Midas. Nelly looked over at him inquiringly. "We should keep it under ninety minutes," said Abrams. "The cosmic rays are really sizzling this morning, and unfortunately I left my cure for cancer in my other pants."
Anoush nodded and tripped a switch on her chronometer. "Ninety minutes," she echoed.
Nelly put one leg outside. He leaned over to fish the rest of himself through the aperture and then began carefully stepping down the ladder to the surface. Anoush and Abrams saw their own helmets reflected in Nelly's faceplate as it sank out of view. "I'm proceeding down the ladder," he radioed importantly. "I'm on the final rung. I'm...about to step down, now."
Silence. A stray breeze brought another puff of dust into the cabin.
After a moment Abrams stuck his helmet out of the hatch and looked down at Nelly standing at the base of the ladder, his boots planted firmly on a bed of rusty gravel. "Aren't you going to say something historic?" prompted Abrams.
"No point," said Nelly, looking up and shaking his head. "Nobody's listening. I'm saving it for when the feeds are back up."
"It's that good a line?"
"It's a great line. It makes that whole 'one giant leap' business sound like pure doggerel."
Abrams whistled. "Wow," he said flatly. "I can't wait. The first moment of the first man to set foot on Mars! Meanwhile, can you move out of the way so I can get down the ladder?"
"You're trying to be funny again."
"Am I? The line between humour and morbid desperation is sometimes thin."
Nelly grimaced. "You know what, Lawrence? I look forward to getting back to Earth so I can knock you on your ass without risking a court martial."
"Yeah," agreed Abrams as he clambered down, boot over boot. "That'll be swell." He stepped off the ladder, his feet sinking slightly into the loose gravel. The sound of the pebbles scraping against one another was low and hollow, almost silent in the sparse atmosphere, like a bad recording.
Abrams straightened and looked out over the field of broken stone and dust into which Midas had set down: Dao Vallis, the dry bed of an ancient canal, with sheer, two kilometer high walls rising up in the distance. The sky at the horizon was a moody pink, an inky purple at the zenith. The sun looked naked and bald, a hard white disc in the east. Abrams' shadow was crisp.
He moved aside as Anoush descended from the lander. "It's beautiful," she said simply.
Abrams smiled. "That was perfect."
Anoush raised one eyebrow. "Only do it again, this time with more feeling?"
He chuckled darkly. "And would it kill you to show a little more skin?"
Nelly circled around the lander until he could see the monolith. His pace slowed, and he looked back at the others. Abrams and Anoush walked up the meet him, stumbling slightly until their sense of coordination caught up with the weak gravity. The stones at their feet knocked and rolled aside with meek, bass clunks.
Anoush stopped beside Nelly but Abrams strode right past them both, proceeding to close the ten meters to the object. It was a tall, thin rectangle like a featureless domino, its surface pitch black beneath a thin layer of bronze powder kicked up by the winds. The edges were sharp and very straight, unweathered. Abrams stretched out his glove.
"Don't touch it, Doc," radioed Nelly urgently.
Abrams hesitated, his finger pads just inches from the monolith. Nelly and Anoush arrived behind him. Nelly cautiously knelt down and picked up a small stone. He cupped it in his glove, testing its weight, and then tossed it at the monolith's broad, black face.
It rebounded away, leaving a small scuff. Abrams leaned his helmet in close, blinking at the damage. "Splinters?" He straightened and turned around. "I think it's made of wood, Major."
Anoush frowned. "Wood?"
"It can't be," muttered Nelly, hands on his hips. "There aren't any trees on Mars."
Abrams shrugged, his arms wide. "There aren't people on Mars, either, yet here we are."
A gust of wind washed through the valley, causing the light pebbles around them to skip along, leaving little sinewy trails in the sand. Also, the monolith swayed and creaked. Nelly shook his head in bewilderment. "This just doesn't make sense. Houston, what's your recommendation?"
He cocked his head as he listened to the private channel. Anoush began photographing the monolith from various angles. Abrams stepped back out of her way. He looked around, spotting some thin ribbons of cloud to the south. When Nelly finally received NASA's response he nodded to himself, then squatted down to scoop up a large rock with both hands.
"They want you to throw another rock?" asked Abrams, wandering over.
Nelly grunted as he heaved up the stone. "Houston approves of my initial investigation vector -- yes, Doctor."
"This is what the guys in the monkey suits did in the movie, too. They threw rocks at it. You know what this proves?"
"What?" asked Anoush.
"It proves definitively that the human race is indeed descended from an ancient race of guys in monkey suits."
Nelly had started rotating himself in a pre-launch wind up to lobbing the rock at the monolith. "I'm preparing to launch object beta," he reported, huffing and puffing. He spun back fast and opened his gloves, the rock shooting free and striking home.
The monolith shook with the impact, its face now marked by a second, larger splintered wound.
Abrams applauded. He walked up to the structure, raised his hand and, before Nelly could object, knocked on it. "It's hollow," he said.
Anoush peered into the broken hole on its front. "It's...it's plywood on a frame of two-by-fours."
Abrams stepped back, brow furrowed. "It's a prop," he concluded. "It's just a prop."
"A prop?" repeated Nelly, then set his mouth in a tight, bloodless line. "Jesus Christ this is weird. Jesus Sunday Christ. Houston? Houston? Come back. We need instruction here, Houston."
They again waited for NASA's reply to crawl back to them at the speed of light. Nelly's gaze searched the sky, as if he could see it coming.
"Keith?"
"Quiet. I'm conferring with NASA."
Abrams touched Nelly's shoulder. "Keith, we have a limited amount of time out here. I think we've got to do some thinking for ourselves. Someone's trying to tell us something here, and we're never going to figure it out if you keep stopping to pose for your statue."
"Someone?" repeated Nelly, still staring into the sky. "What do you mean, Doc? We're the first men on Mars."
"Maybe we're not."
Keith's head snapped down and his eyes widened. "You really think the Chinese beat us to the punch?"
"I don't know what to think except that we've got to do some thinking."
"That's damn arrogant, Doc."
"I'm sorry?"
"Do you know how many geniuses we have at NASA, Doc? Do you know how many experts are eating, drinking, and sleeping our problem right this very second?"
"Sleeping our problem?"
Nelly waved dismissively and stepped closer to Abrams, his index finger erect and threatening. "Listen: there are only two sets of brains down here, Doc --"
"Three, actually."
"The micro doesn't count! And don't interrupt me, Captain."
"I was thinking of Balour."
"Balour?"
They looked over at Balour Anoush as she strode up to them with one cupped hand extended before her. "Gentlemen, take a look at this."
Nelly and Abrams spoke simultaneously: "What?"
She held it out in her gloved palm: it was small, pale yellow cube with rough edges and porous faces. "It looks like a crouton," decided Anoush. She gestured over her shoulder. "And there's more of them, back there, arranged in a long line."
"A trail," corrected Abrams. "And it's not a crouton -- it's a breadcrumb."
Nelly tried to scratch his head but his helmet was in the way. "Aren't croutons made of breadcrumbs?"
"Yes, but nobody leaves a trail of croutons. They garnish salads with them. Trails they make from breadcrumbs."
"They who?" asked Nelly sharply.
"Hansel and Gretel," replied Abrams. "Fairy-tale characters, Major. They leave a trail a breadcrumbs so they can find their way back out of the Black Forest."
"Jesus Sunday Christ," said Nelly again.
Anoush squeezed the breadcrumb. It squeaked as it crumbled into frozen kibbles that were carried off in the breeze. She dusted her gloves together as she took a few steps to the side of the monolith again. "The wind is skewing the trail," she observed. She looked back at Abrams and Nelly. "If we're to follow it, we should go now."
"Follow it?" frowned Nelly.
Abrams nodded. "Trails are for following. You wanted instruction, now you have it. The instruction is: walk this way."
"This is highly irregular," protested Nelly. "This isn't what I signed up for." His eyes widened, then flicked to the side as he listened to NASA on the private channel. He licked his lips nervously. "Houston authorizes action on our own discretion to get to the bottom of this."
"See?" said Abrams.
Nelly looked away from him, back toward the lander. "Alright, let's get the rover put together, people. Hup, hup, hup!"
After two hours of working in shifts the rover vehicle was assembled and its solar panels unfurled to charge up the auxiliary system. The cabin sat between two sets of large, soft wheels and beneath a shielded canopy whose top was inscribed with a lightning bolt and the word GATORADE in fluorescent green paint. The rover's official name -- decided by a contest on the back of potato chip bags -- was The Marzulator, but to date none of the astronauts had consented to refer to it that way.
Anoush checked the meter. "We're almost ready to go," she reported, dropping the last of her implements back into the tool box. "I'll drive."
"I'll drive," corrected Nelly. "You'll be holding down the fort, Commander. Houston's just given us the green to erect the habitat."
Anoush made a sour face. "I can't erect the habitat alone, Keith. We should go together."
"The rover only seats two."
"I can sit in the cargo flat."
"The cargo flat isn't under the radiation shield. Forget it. The doc and I are going to check this out, and that's final. Houston concurs. Besides, if the broadcast pack comes back on-line it's your face everyone's going to want to see."
"I don't care about the bloody broadcasts," Anoush growled and then, after struggling to refrain, added acidly: "And I hate Pepsi!"
Nelly, startled, cast a nervous look into the sky as if some angry commercial gods would roil and thunder in condemnation of her heresy. "You're just making work for the transcript finishers," he said quietly, his expression menacing. "It's anti-mission, and it's anti-NASA, and if I hear one more word like that you'll spend every minute of your time sitting in the habitat watching gauges. You got that, girl?"
"Don't call me girl, Keith. It's demeaning, just like every other aspect of this whole dirty fiasco. I didn't fly millions of kilometers to be a television Barbie or a belittled housesitter."
"No," agreed Nelly hotly. "You flew millions of kilometers to do what I tell you. Clear? Now, you will do your duty sweetly, Commander, starting this second; I can improvise a brig if I have to."
"You listen to me, you overblown --"
"Discussion over," he interrupted firmly. "Besides," he added, glancing at his chronometer, "isn't it time for you to pray to your god?"
Balour Anoush's eyes narrowed dangerously, her cheeks flushed. After a second she unclenched her gloves, turned on heel and stalked back toward Midas, her shoulder clipping Abrams on his way out. "Sorry?" he called to her, rubbing his arm. "You really have a way with women, Major."
"Shut up, Lawrence. I don't have any more patience for your guff. This is a serious situation. Just get in the goddamn rover."
"Okay, okay. Keep your shirt on."
"What did I say about being funny?"
"It's just an expression, not a joke."
"It's guff," snorted Keith. "No matter how you dress it up. And there'll be no more guff on this mission. You hear?"
"I hear, I hear."
They took their places inside the clear cabin pod, their feet seeming to hover on a bed of translucent reflection artifacts a few feet off the ground. The engine purred. Major Nelly knocked it into gear. The Pepsi logo hubcaps began to turn, kicking up a fine ash of Martian soil in their wake. Nelly turned the wheel and the rover nosed past Midas. Anoush did not wait outside to wave. They proceeded on beyond the broken wooden monolith.
"Slow down," said Abrams. "I can't see the trail."
The rover bumped along at a more sedate pace, Abrams calling directions and squinting at the closely spaced breadcrumb path. In spots the wind has pushed wide sawtooths into the trail but the overall direction was clear, meandering steadily toward the valley wall through a field of boulders.
"Veer right."
"Veering right."
"Straighten out."
"Acknowledged."
"Drift left."
The closest boulders grew from the horizon to tower over the rover as it slipped into the pool of shadows between them. Some of the stones were ten and twelve meters in diameter, their faces weathered smooth. They formed a winding, natural labyrinth.
Nelly slowed the rover to a crawl. The sound of their progress echoed off the boulder faces, sullen and low. Pebbles grumbled under the tires.
Abrams pointed. "Hard to left."
"Going hard," reported Nelly.
The rover wound into a long corridor of giant boulders, a looming gauntlet at whose terminus rose a tall, rectilinear shape. A wash of airborne dust caught up with the rover as it slowed even further, coating the pod and obscuring the view. Nelly hit the windshield wipers. "Is it another monolith?"
"I can't tell," said Abrams, squinting through the streaky lines of dust the blades pushed back and forth fecklessly across the view.
The rover crawled forward, the periodic march of shadow and sun slipping over the vehicle. Nelly drew it to a gradual stop ten meters shy of the object. He toggled his radio. "Commencing extra-vehicular excursion now, Houston."
He sat back in his seat and turned to Abrams. "What?" said Abrams.
"Excurt," prompted Nelly.
"Who -- me?"
"Keep an open channel," ordered Nelly. "Keep me apprised of every step, Commander."
Abrams sighed and popped open his door. He clambered down between the rover's wheels and then began walking cautiously forward. "I'm walking toward the object," he reported dutifully. "Eight meters."
He paused as he was buffeted by an indecisive breeze that kicked up another roiling plume of bronze sand. When it cleared he proceeded forward again, eyes locked on the two meter high block which was itself coated in a layer of fine dust. With a shaking hand he carefully reached up to wipe a section of the object's closest face clean.
His radio crackled. "Report," said Nelly.
Abram's mouth went dry. He blinked. He wiped another section of the object clean. "I don't know what to say, Major...it's..."
"It's what? What is it, Doc?"
"It's a vending machine."
That hung in the air for a moment. Abrams took a step back and put his hands on his hips, surveying the thing from top to bottom. Nelly's voice sounded in his ear again. "I think I got some interference there, Doc. Come again?"
Abrams repeated himself. He turned around as Nelly climbed out of the rover and walked over next to him, hands limp at his sides. Together they read the large word inscribed along the upper edge: LEMONADE! And then beneath, in smaller letters: SWEET REFRESHMENT FOR EVERY WEARY TRAVELLER.
Abrams scooped a line of dust off the machine's works, discovering a small slot and a push button with a picture of a lemon on it. He said, "Do you have a quarter?"
He knew Nelly did. Nelly always carried with him the first quarter he had ever earned on his paper route as a kid. He told everyone it was a symbol to him of the endless opportunity offered by America to anyone who was willing to work for their dreams. Nelly hesitantly withdrew the tarnished coin from a pocket on his environment suit, fingering its edge through his glove. "It's my lucky quarter," he mumbled.
Abrams plucked it away. "Good," he said. "Some luck we could use."
Before Nelly could object he fed it into the slot. It disappeared with a quiet clunk, followed by the thump and grind of machinery coming to life. Both men took another step back. Something banged and clanged as it worked its way down through the innards.
An aluminium can dropped into a shallow hopper at the base of the unit. The can had a picture of a lemon on it, too.
They leaned in closer. "What is it?" gasped Nelly.
"It looks like a can of lemonade," said Abrams. He straightened. "I know, I know -- there are no lemon trees on Mars. Still..." He reached out for it.
"Belay that refreshment, Commander!" barked Nelly.
"What?"
"We don't know what that drink is capable of."
Abrams frowned, withdrawing his hand. "So what do you want to do?"
"Let's unpack the ranger."
The men unloaded the robotic ranger from the rover's cargo flat. Abrams extended the solar panels and activated the power. Nelly pointed the control wand at it, got a signal, then drove the little wheeled robot up to the lemonade vending machine. With precise twists of the dials he unfolded the grappling armature and manoeuvred it around the aluminium can in the hopper. "Easy..." he muttered to himself as he flipped the ranger into reverse. "Easy..."
The can was gently placed upright on the sand, and Nelly set to aligning the grappler around the pull tab. He paused, turning to Abrams. "We'd better stand back."
Abrams and Nelly knelt behind the rover's front right wheel, their helmets peeking out over the fat nubbies of tread. "Ready," said Abrams.
"Actuating the tab in three...two...one..."
The ranger pulled the tab. The can hissed and toppled over as a cloud of golden liquid boiled away into the rare air. After a tense moment the men approached, stooping over to examine the residue sprayed over the ranger. "What do you think?" asked Nelly. "Should we go back for the mass-spectrometer?"
Abrams wiped up a few droplets on his glove, then tested its stickiness between two fingers. "I'm pretty sure it's just lemonade, Major."
"Lemonade..." repeated Nelly cryptically, looking into the sky. "Now that doesn't make a lick of sense."
"Well," offered Abrams, "it is a lemonade vending machine. There's a certain thematic congruence, you have to admit."
Nelly shook his head. "This is completely unexpected."
"Isn't that why we're here? If everything about Mars was expected why bother to explore the place at all?"
"There's unexpected and then there's unexpected," philosophized Nelly. "I mean, I was expecting something unexpected like -- I don't know -- caves full of microbes, or evidence of spores in the dry aquifers...not...this."
"That's the funny thing about the unexpected," said Abrams drily.
"There's nothing funny about this."
Abrams shrugged. "I have to disagree, Major. There is something distinctly funny about this. I think by now it should be clear that somebody is having a laugh at our expense."
"The Chinese?" said Nelly quickly. "Yes, maybe," he answered himself, nodding. "The more I think about it the more this has Chinese written all over it."
Abrams gestured to the vending machine looming over them. "I don't know," he said. "I can't see the Chinese using unilingual signage, unless it were Chinese signage. This vending machine is labelled in English: for every weary traveller. That's us. This isn't a lost piece of infrastructure -- it's a joke on us."
"I feel dizzy. This is too bizarre. Houston? Houston? Are you getting all this?"
"Relax, Major. Here, let me buy you a lemonade."
"Shut up, Lawrence! What did I tell you about guff?"
Abrams said nothing. Nelly paced in a circle before the vending machine, head down. Finally he looked up again, his expression pained. "I don't know what we should do. There was nothing in our training to cover this kind of contingency. Who would do this, Doc? Who the hell could be on Mars before us?"
Abrams was looking past Nelly's shoulder. He cleared his throat. "Um. Why don't we ask that guy, Major?"
"What guy?" snapped Nelly. Abrams pointed. Nelly spun.
Strolling around the rover at a casual pace was a figure in a light-weight, form-fitting metallic silver environment suit. At his heels was a dog done up in similar form, the transparent bubble enclosing its muzzle fogged with panting breath. The dog's tail, wrapped in a thin foil, was wagging in a friendly way.
Nelly froze. "Who...what --?" he managed to croak.
There was a brief burst of radio static and then the man said, "Hi there! Sorry I'm late. You know how it is when you're trying to get out the door -- that's always the moment the dog has to do his business." He leaned down and pet the dog, who nosed at his gloved hand. "Who's a good boy?" he asked the dog.
"What is the meaning of this?" cried Nelly.
The man paused from petting to look up again. "I apologize in advance for the tedium, but I'm afraid we've got some paperwork to fill out. Do you gentlemen have anything to declare?"
"Anything to declare?" repeated Nelly, his voice cracking. "What the hell are you talking about, man?"
"Oh, sorry," said the silver interloper again. He offered out his hand to shake. "How rude of me. My name's Dwayne. I'm the customs officer around these parts."
"Jesus Sunday Christ," said Nelly.
"Hello," said Abrams.
Nelly swung his perplexed gaze back and forth between Abrams and Dwayne, then finally settled on the dog. "Houston?" he mouthed feebly.
Dwayne dropped his extended hand with a shrug and then proffered a clipboard with an attached pen. "Would you mind terribly just jotting down a quick manifest of any equipment you've landed? Oh, and if you can, please indicate any waste you intend to leave behind. You'll see the checkboxes at the bottom there."
Abrams stepped forwarded and accepted the clipboard, then scanned it dumbly. "You're a customs officer?" he heard himself saying with wonder. He looked up. "Seriously?"
Dwayne gave him a curt nod and a broad smile. "Welcome to Mars!"
3/3
The world gasped.
Horns honked, and stadiums full of people surged to their feet to cheer or bellow. Journalists sighed with relief, knowing they had an explosive lead for the nightly news as clergy on every continent set frothing to their keyboards, having seized upon the inescapable theme of their next sermon.
At Mission Control in Houston the Managing Director of Commercial Relations sprinted with a fresh print-out in her hand, waving it over her head triumphantly. "The Nielsens are through the roof!" she cried, and the engineers at their consoles pumped their fists in the air, hooting and grinning, shaking hands and squeezing one another's shoulders in mutual congratulation.
It was, as they say, a media frenzy.
Framed by the stars, Captain Yolande Grimaux the celebrated Swiss lesbian and Lieutenant Franklin Fisher the world's first self-proclaimed extra-terrestrial homosexual, had kissed. Mars was instantly redubbed "the planet of love."
"I didn't mean to," whispered Fisher hoarsely, smelling her hair.
"It's okay, Frank," Grimaux whispered back, stroking his cheek.
They held hands and drifted in the micro-gravity, saying nothing further, eyes squinched shut. The last thing either of them wanted to see was the unblinking eye of the cameras; the last thing either of them wanted to think about was how they were now the most famous romantic couple alive, the object of the collective gossip and gawk of billions of human beings.
Fisher was in heaven: he had shown the world that his sexual orientation was at the very least ambiguous enough to include snogging hot lesbians. Grimaux was in hell: she had shown herself just how low she would sink, accepting promises of riches in exchange for agreeing to commit the largest distraction in history.
She ached, imagining how her partner in Geneva must be reeling.
On the surface of the red planet, on the rocky edge of Dao Vallis, Major Keith Nelly was faring comparably poorly. He felt as if he might throw up. His eyes snapped open as the customs officer spoke again, his gravelly, lilting voice crisp through his helmet's speakers. He said, "Why don't you gents come inside for a spell, warm yourselves up?"
"Inside where?" demanded Nelly sharply.
The silver-suited interloper gestured over his shoulder. "There's a lock just back there, at the base of the cliffs. What say we head over, take a load off and chat some?"
Abrams looked up from the clipboard. "That's very hospitable of you." He shoved the clipboard under his arm and extended a gloved hand. "I'm Abrams. Lawrence Abrams."
"Pleasure," said Dwayne. "You from Boston?"
"Originally. I live in Tel Aviv now."
Dwayne nodded. "I'm originally from Earth, too. Born in Maine, but I spent a lot of years over the border in New Brunswick on account of Vietnam. The name's Dwayne Edgar Rogers."
Abrams bowed his head politely. "This is Major Keith Nelly, our mission commander."
"Pleasure," said Dwayne again.
Nelly said nothing.
"Well, we'd best get a move on," decided Dwayne with a farmer-like appraisal of the rosy sky. He turned around and walked out of the shadow of the lemonade machine, heading for the nearby base of the cliffs. "Come on, Heinlein," he called. The dog bounded at his heels, tail wagging eagerly.
"Come on, Keith," cajoled Abrams on the private circuit as he started after the pair. "We've got nothing to lose."
"This is damn peculiar," growled Nelly, following reluctantly.
Beyond the next looming boulder a space had been cut into the cliff face, with two sets of riveted windows framing a large, round aperture marked DAO LOCK 17. Dwayne touched a control beside it and the aperture ground open. The three men and the amicable dog stepped inside and the door closed behind them.
A loud hissing sounded as the chamber was pressurized with warm oxygen and nitrogen. Their helmets fogged up.
The inner door clicked and drew aside. Dwayne gestured to proceed, and the two astronauts in their bulky white environment suits walked cautiously past him and into a spacious lobby with a black and white tiled floor, the lines blurred by their misted faceplates. Abrams looked over the infographic display in his helmet and nodded at Nelly. "It's clean," he reported, reaching for his collar.
Nelly grabbed his arm. "Don't," he said. He looked over his shoulder. "Wait for him."
Dwayne sauntered up beside them as he cracked the seal on his collar and lifted the silver helmet off his head. He was an old man -- at least seventy but maybe eighty -- his look robust and tough. He ran a wide, liver-spotted hand through his crew-cut white hair. His face was square and weathered, his eyes a liquid blue. He knelt down beside Heinlein the dog and popped off his helmet, too. Heinlein scampered across the lobby to a plastic water dish and lapped at its contents.
Abrams took off his own helmet. After a brief hesitation Nelly followed suit. The air was clear and refreshing, smelling slightly of mint.
The men looked around.
The lobby was furnished two simple benches, one before each bank of windows, a small steel cart with steam rising from its top at the far end. Beside the cart was a chair with a newspaper on it; the banner said THE MARTIAN HERALD and the headline story was TERRANS TO ATTEMPT LANDING illustrated with a smiling photograph of Major Nelly. Beyond the chair was a row of kiosks with shuttered windows fronted by a series of pole and velvet chain barriers to organize a queue. Above the kiosks was a multilingual sign: CUSTOMS AND IMMIGRATION.
"Customs and immigration?" read Nelly. He wheeled on their host. "Who are you people? Why would you build a plywood monolith to lure us to a customs office?"
"We didn't want to put the lemonade stand too close to your landing site, in case it proved a navigational hazard," explained Dwayne. "So we made a marker, and left a trail. Makes sense, doesn't it?"
"But why a lemonade stand in an environment where actually drinking the lemonade would be impossible?" asked Abrams.
Dwayne raised his brow. "I guess we thought it was kind of funny."
Nelly was looking past them. On the opposite side of the room was a railing girdling a wide elevator shaft from which came the tinny sounds of distant music. It sounded to Abrams like a calliope, the melody cheerful.
Nelly wandered over to the railing and looked down the shaft, tracing the steel cables down through the blasted rock tunnel walls. Far below, light glimmered from openings to subterranean levels, dozens upon dozens of them descending to the limits of vision. He thought he could hear the murmuring of people, a far away crowd. Incomprehensibly reverberating announcements sounded over a public address system, interrupted by a rattling, whoosh and screech of metal on metal. Nelly looked up. "What was that?"
"Probably the roller coaster," said Dwayne. "They've got a ferris wheel set up, too. I love ferris wheels."
"Why would a Martian base have a ferris wheel?" he asked suspiciously.
"For the kids," replied Dwayne. "Don't your kids like rides?"
"There are children here?"
"Sure," said Dwayne jauntily. "Listen, why don't you gents let me fix you up with some hot cocoa? That'd be nice, wouldn't it? M'm, m'm. Everybody loves hot cocoa."
Abrams and Nelly watched in bewildered awe as the old gentleman shuffled over to the steaming cart, stripped off his gloves, and prepared two servings of hot cocoa. The astronauts accepted their mugs mutely. Ignoring a severe look from Nelly, Abrams took a sip. "Delicious," he declared.
"That should warm your bones a mite," agreed Dwayne with a smile. "Now, I hate to be a bother but how about those forms?"
Abrams looked down at the clipboard again, then jotted some entries into the fields provided. He handed the clipboard to Dwayne who glanced at it, tore off a yellow carbon copy from beneath the top sheet, and then slipped it into a slot beside one of the kiosk windows. He jammed the clipboard under his arm and turned back to the men. "Okay then," he said. "I expect you gents have a few questions. I'll do my best to answer them up for you, and then we can all take the elevator down into the city and the hooplah can begin."
"Hooplah?" echoed Nelly. "What hooplah?"
"This is a big event," explained Dwayne. "You're our first interplanetary visitors, you understand. Once you gents are comfortable we're to get underground to meet everybody and then the real pageant begins. That's what you Terrans like more than anything, isn't it -- a pageant?"
Abrams flinched. "But, please, who are you?"
Dwayne raised his chin. "We're the Martians, of course. This is our planet."
Nelly shook his head. "How can it be your planet?"
Dwayne offered him a tight little smile. "Simple," he said. "We got here first. We claimed it." He glanced down. "You're letting your cocoa get cold."
"You can't claim Mars," Nelly insisted. "The 1967 Outer Space Treaty expressly forbids it."
"Oh, that old thing," grinned Dwayne. "I think you'll find we don't have too much regard for Earthly paper here on Mars. We have our own way of doing things."
"But it's the law."
Dwayne chuckled and hooked his thumbs into his belt. "Yeah, well, you feel free to send a bunch of lawyers out here whenever you feel like it. Or did you already bring one? You a lawyer, Mr. Abrams?"
"I'm a physician."
"Like I say, then: the matter can be argued in our Supreme Court at your discretion...that is, once your boys take a few courses so they qualify to practice here. I understand the university's got a summer programme that's very affordable."
"I think the United Nations would be a more suitable venue," said Nelly.
"You can decide anything you like at your United Nations. It won't change a thing out here, though, Mr. Nelly."
Nelly straightened to his full height and took an aggressive step toward the jolly New Englander. "I've had just about enough of this nonsense, do you understand me? The planets belong to humanity. You can't expect us to just roll over and let you take Mars."
"Mister, we've already taken it. It's a done deal. Possession's nine tenths of dibs." He paused to pet Heinlein as the dog loped over and nudged at his master's palm. Dwayne looked up again. "Now, we're not here to stand in anybody's way. Mars is dedicated to facilitating scientific missions of all stripes: all we ask is that you share your data and that you don't litter."
"The Earth won't stand for that."
"Is that a fact, Mr. Nelly?" asked Dwayne wryly, staring back unflinchingly into Nelly's bluster. "And just what do you think the Earth can do about it? We're already here, and we love Mars. You can't even reckon the army it would take to force us out."
"Covert operatives could --"
"Bullsquat. Covert doesn't even enter into it," said Dwayne with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Space is transparent, Mr. Nelly. We can see you coming four months out. And make no mistake: we allowed you to land here today. We didn't have to."
"Then why did you?"
"To be friendly. To start things off on the right foot."
"Announcing that you've stolen a planet is hardly diplomatic."
"Well, there's one way of looking at it and there's another. Some people might say it's awfully rude of you kick off your visit by challenging our sovereignty."
"Sovereignty? Don't be ridiculous. What gives you the right?"
"Presence and control, Mr. Nelly. We're established and we're self-sufficient. If you want to get rid of us you're going to have to crawl back to your sponsors and ask them to foot the bill to send out a military expedition set up with weapons of extinction. Do you think they'll go for it? They might -- though, I feel it's only right to warn you: we are prepared to defend our home." He let that sink in, then gave a little smirk. "With infinite complacency you go to and fro over your globe about your little affairs, serene in your assurance of your empire over matter...yet across the gulf of space, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, have regarded your Earth -- and slowly and surely drawn our plans against you."
Abrams raised an eyebrow. "That's H. G. Wells, right?"
Dwayne nodded, turning away from Nelly. "I grew up on that stuff. I've also got a soft spot for Jules Verne."
"How long have you been here?" demanded Nelly, shouldering Abrams aside as he inserted himself forcefully into Dwayne's new line of sight.
"Decades," replied Dwayne breezily.
"How many are you?" Nelly barked, now circling Dwayne like a predator.
"Millions," replied Dwayne, pivoting to track Nelly. "Our underground cities teem, Mr. Nelly."
"You could never get that many people out here right under our noses," countered Nelly hotly. "How could be that be done?"
"In the usual way, Mr. Nelly. The first settlers were fruitful." Dwayne plucked Abrams' empty mug from his limp fingers and placed it back on the cart. "But let's not get caught up in all this unpleasantness. We're not politicians, are we? It's time for you gents to step into the limelight. Let's take the elevator down."
He gestured to the shaft. The calliope was still playing. The distant roller coaster screeched again. Crowds hooted and thrilled. Abrams shivered.
"And then what happens?" he asked.
"You meet the mayor and the prime minister, shake hands, get your picture taken -- that sort of thing. We'll broadcast the whole show straight back to Earth, to coincide with the unveiling of the Martian Embassy and the formal opening of diplomatic relations."
Nelly's eyed narrowed. "What do you need an embassy for?"
"Processing applications for immigration, of course. Once we let the cat out of the bag I expect plenty of folks will want to consider starting a new life here."
"Like who?" challenged Nelly.
Dwayne shrugged, then hugged the clipboard to his side and raised one arm in an attitude of dignified oration. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore..."
Abrams smiled. Nelly did not. "You're interfering with our broadcasts," he accused.
Dwayne nodded. "We figured on having a chance like this to chat before making the whole thing common knowledge. We wanted to give your powers that be a chance to catch their breath before going live."
"That's supposed to be consideration at work?"
"Supposed to be," confirmed Dwayne.
"Where is this embassy?"
"I'm sure the Shah will make that plain when the time is right."
"Who is the Shah?"
"The Shah of Anwar, Mr. Nelly. He's our representative on your planet."
"As soon as NASA receives our transmission he'll be arrested by the Secret Service within an hour, I can guarantee that."
"I doubt it," said Dwayne lightly. "You'd have to get up awfully early in the morning to outfox the Shah. He takes...a long view. He knows you'll come looking and he's laid you a trail of puzzles within puzzles. He's ready for anything you care to dish out."
"We'll see about that."
"Ayuh," agreed Dwayne. "I reckon we will."
The two men stared at each other haughtily. Abrams squeezed himself between them and steered Nelly a few steps back by the shoulders. "Let's not get testy," said Abrams quietly. "It's no help to anyone going off half-cocked."
"I'm fully cocked, Doc," pronounced Nelly through gritted teeth. "This is an outrage! Who in the hell do these so-called Martians think they are?"
"Who the hell are we?"
Nelly shook his head in contempt, his complexion reddening. "We're Americans, Doc. And don't you ever forget that."
"I'm Israeli."
"You were born in America," hissed Nelly. "That still counts!"
"Counts for what?"
Nelly pushed forward into Abrams' chest, bearing down on him with eyes wide and charged. "Captain," he growled, his voice thick with menace, "I thought I told you to stop being funny."
Abrams sighed, then turned over his shoulder to face Dwayne. "Mr. Rogers, would you mind if my colleague and I had a word in private?"
"Not at all."
"Not here," grunted Nelly. "We'll talk outside."
"Suit yourself," said Dwayne. He sat down on the chair and unfolded his newspaper. Heinlein trotted over and Dwayne scratched him behind the ears.
When the airlock had cycled and released them back outside Abrams opened his mouth to speak but Nelly shook his head curtly. He walked up to Abrams, grabbed his helmet, and pulled it forward until it made contact with his own. "Kill your radio," he said, his muffled voice conveyed through the touching surfaces.
Abrams did so. "I don't see any choice here, Keith," he said, discomfited by the strangely intimate experience of conversing faceplate to faceplate. "Rogers is right about one thing -- we're not politicians. We're scientists. We're here to learn what we can. So let's see this underground city. I can't imagine they intend to harm us."
Nelly sneered. "You don't have any idea, Doc. These lunatics could be capable of anything."
"Why do you say they're lunatics?"
"A plywood monolith? A lemonade stand in the middle of nowhere? A people that greet us with an old man and a dog? It's like it's all a big joke to them."
"It is," agreed Abrams.
"So what does it mean?"
Abrams shook his head. "They're showing us they own this world. Don't you get it? Humour is power, Major. It comes from a position of control. They're demonstrating the security of that position by trivializing our arrival here. It's nothing to them, our being here. It's a theme for a fair, not a crisis. It's just a holiday, they want us to think."
"What do you mean by that? What do you mean 'they want us to think'?"
"Keith, look around you. These Martians are bending over backward to show us how mighty they are."
"By joking around?"
"Exactly. Exactly. What's Rogers trying to impress on us? Think about it: he says there are millions of them. He implies that a generation of kids have been born here. He tells us they've got underground cities, that they've been lying in wait for years for us to arrive, to announce themselves. He wants us to know that they've thought it all out, and they hold all the cards. For God's sake, the man wears an environment suit that looks thinner than cotton -- do you think his wardrobe is accidental? Everything about this is meant to telegraph one, and just one, significant impression."
"What?"
"Strength."
Nelly's eyes flicked to the side, and Abrams heard a foreign mumble inside his helmet. "It's Houston," said Nelly. "Standby, Doc."
Nelly broke contact and stepped back from Abrams, head cocked as he listened to the message from NASA. His expression hardened. He nodded to himself and then turned on heel and started marching back toward The Marzulator.
Abrams caught up with him as he reached into a compartment beneath the cargo flat and unlocked its face with his command keys. A panel was revealed. Nelly typed a quick sequence upon its keys, and then an inner compartment clicked open. He swung aside the reinforced metal door and extracted a brace of pistols.
He straightened and leaned into Abrams, helmets touching again. "Fetch your medical kit, Doc. Just in case."
"In case of what? What the hell are you doing? Are those guns? Where did you get guns?"
"This mission is brought to you in part by Smith & Wesson," said Nelly flatly.
"But what the hell are you planning to do?"
Nelly's face filled Abrams' vision, faceplate to faceplate. Abrams wanted to look away but he couldn't. Nelly said, "Houston says this meeting never happened. Houston says we don't know there's a claim on Mars." He swallowed, fixing Abrams with a sharp, humourless look. "Houston says until our policy's resolved there should be no witnesses."
"No witnesses?" echoed Abrams, his brow furrowed.
"Out of deference for your oath I'll let you take out the dog. I'll do Rogers."
"What!" shouted Abrams, temporarily breaking contact between their faceplates as he staggered backward in horror. He rammed his head back at Nelly's, knocking both of them against the rover's giant wheel. "NASA wants us to shoot them?" gasped Abrams.
"No witnesses," repeated Nelly gravely.
"I'm not going to shoot a dog! I'm telling you that right now, Keith. There's no way!"
Something clicked. Abrams glanced down at the gun pressed into his chest. He looked up to meet Nelly's cold eyes again.
"You'll do as you're told, Captain."
The airlock cycled. The inner door slid back. Nelly and Abrams stepped over the threshold and back into the lobby, tripping the locks on their collars and pulling off their helmets. Abrams hugged his metal medical case. Nelly kept one arm hovering over his external cargo pocket.
Dwayne was whistling. Abrams recognized the tune: Gustav Holst's The Planets -- specifically the first movement: Mars, the Bringer of War. The old man's solo interpretation of the bombastic crescendo trailed off as he looked up from his newspaper. "Gents?" he said.
Nelly cleared his throat as he reached into his pocket. Abrams looked away. He peeled off his gloves, fumbled with his own pocket, and withdrew the hand gun. His head was pulsing in sympathy with his racing heart. He stared at the weapon dumbly, then jumped when the resounding bark of Nelly's weapon banged through the customs and immigration lobby.
Feeling sick, Abrams raised his own weapon and levelled it at the dog. "I'm sorry," he whispered. Heinlein's tongue lolled carelessly. Abrams squeezed the trigger.
The dog's head came apart. Debris jangled across the tile floor in a wide arc, broken screws and torn metal skittering. The body keeled over with a heavy clank. It bled antifreeze.
Abrams gaped. "My God," he cried. "It's a machine!"
He spun. Nelly was standing over the headless cadaver of Dwayne Rogers, staring agog at a similar spray of ruined electronics and gears. The gun dangled limp at Nelly's side. "Jesus Sunday Christ," he said. "I don't understand..."
"Robots," said Abrams heavily, licking his dry lips. "They were just robots, Major. We...we didn't kill anyone."
He only realized how quiet it had become when the calliope music abruptly stopped.
Nelly narrowed his eyes and strafed across the floor to the elevator shaft. He ducked behind the railing, then peeked quickly over its edge. He paused, then scooped up a piece of twisted metal and tossed it down the shaft. It banged loudly on the sides and then hit the bottom with a thud. "It's not real," he said, looking over his shoulder at Abrams. "It's forced perspective...only goes about ten meters down."
Abrams walked over to the row of kiosks and pushed up the metal shutter. Behind the window was a wall of rock. "These are fake, too."
"What the hell is going on?"
Abrams wiped his hand down his face, then shook his head and smiled darkly. "It's a ruse, Major. It's all a front."
"But why?"
"You heard what Rogers said: it's a pageant."
"But to what end, man?"
Abrams caught himself humming Holst's music. "War," he said.
"What?"
"They never intended us to go down the elevator. I imagine that if we'd consented Rogers would've found another way to provoke you. It was all a show, to make us think they were formidable -- to generate fear and uncertainty, perhaps to provoke a military response."
"But why, man?" cried Nelly, his face glistening in a bath of sudden, nervous sweat. "It doesn't make sense!"
"Someone is playing a long game here, Keith. They wanted to frame our move, to control our response. They wanted us to participate in their passion play, to set us against them to somehow advance their plot. They wanted to shape their relationship with the Earth for some kind of drama, using us as unwitting actors."
"But how would Mars profit by conflict?"
Abrams smiled sadly. "Conflict opens many opportunities, Major. It's the world's oldest form of theatre."
Nelly's mouth tightened. "That's sick," he declared.
"It's human," agreed Abrams.
They both stopped speaking as the ventilators looming over them from the ceiling clicked and went silent. The constant whisper of moving air they had already learned to ignore faded away. The room became colder almost instantly, and a moment later then lights guttered and died.
"Pressure's dropping," observed Abrams.
"They're trying to kill us."
"No, they're trying to kick us out."
"Because we ruined their plans?"
Abrams shrugged. "Or because we fulfilled our part in them."
Nelly's face darkened, his muscles taut. "They're psychotic."
Abrams shot Nelly an incredulous look. "Let me make sure I understand this. You -- you who just ordered me to shoot a dog -- think people who offer you lemonade are psychotic?" His eyes widened. "You want to know what's psychotic, Keith? Harassing people until they buy enough Pepsi to send six morons like us to Mars so we can get our faces on cereal boxes!"
"That's completely different from having the gall to --"
"No, you idiot, it isn't! We set the stage. Mars is speaking to us in the only terms that gain any traction on our sorry planet: theatre, farce, and scandal. Can we blame them for speaking our language better than we speak it ourselves?"
Nelly coughed, then put a hand to his head as the effort to draw air caused him to become dizzy. He picked up his helmet and jammed it back on, latching the collar and then taking a deep breath. Abrams mirrored him. His radio crackled. "Let's get out of here, Doc."
Nelly stowed his gun, snapped closed his pocket, then stomped over to the airlock and tried to actuate the door. It did not respond. He spotted a manual crank recessed into the bulkhead beside the frame and set to turning it. The airlock ground ponderously open just wide enough for the astronauts to squeeze through. Nelly put one foot over the threshold and then cast a look back at Abrams.
"Doc?"
Abrams remained in the lobby, his eyes vacant and his expression distant. He blinked, glancing at Nelly only briefly. As if in a dream he walked very slowly across the room, Nelly tracking him. Abrams gingerly took a seat on one of the benches and rested his medical kit on his knees.
"Doc?" prompted Nelly again.
Abrams looked over vaguely. "Go on, Major," he said.
"What?"
"I'm staying."
Nelly's lip twitched. "Staying? What the hell do you mean? Staying for what? The air's gone. This place'll be frozen inside of fifteen minutes. Our suits are only good for another twenty minutes at best. We have to get back to the ship!"
"Nah," said Abrams. "They won't let me die."
"There's nobody here but robots, you damned fool!"
Abrams shrugged again, his expression pensive. "It's hard to say what the real situation is, isn't it? Myself, I'm going to gamble that somebody's behind it all. They're watching, and they'll come for me."
"You're mad!"
"I can live with that."
"I'm not losing another astronaut!"
"You are, in fact."
"I don't think so." Nelly drew his pistol and pointed it at Abrams.
Abrams jerked his chin in a quick flick down toward the barrel of his own pistol projecting from beneath his medical kit, levelled at Nelly. He smirked. "Go ahead, Keith. But make sure you say something pithy as we shoot. Think it up now, because this isn't a rehearsal. I've already got my line ready."
He cocked his weapon.
The men stared at each other for a long moment, the only sound the rhythmic tide of their environment suits' respirators.
"Jesus Sunday Christ," said Nelly. "Two suicides on one mission!" He lowered his weapon and slipped inside the airlock. A few seconds later Abrams watched him trudge across the sand back toward the lemonade stand and the rover. The rover's engine hummed.
Abrams watched it go, then arranged himself comfortably on the bench. He checked his oxygen meter and sighed. And then, like so many of his immigrant forebearers before him, he prepared himself to wait patiently to be processed.
Though he knew it taxed his supply of oxygen, Abrams could not help but whistle Holst.
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